Birds of the Indonesian ArchipelagoGreater Sundas and Wallacea

1 valoración en Birds of the Indonesian ArchipelagoGreater Sundas and Wallacea

1. 

   

   Valorado con 5 de 5

   Michael Cunningham (propietario verificado) – marzo 19, 2021

   I received the flexicover this morning; one week and half a planet after submitting the order. I’ve spent a day scheduled for other things poring through the book. It is difficult to put it aside, let alone find fault. Of any good arising from our response to this awful pandemic, this superb revised guide is a noteworthy part.

   The flexicover itself is softer than other guides and probably needs some extra protection in your pack. The wonder is that a guide of this immensely diverse area actually does fit comfortably in a field bag (1,456 species in 536 pages).

   The spartan cover design features Wallace’s Standardwing (male, typical form?) in display, by Ilian Velikov. This spectacular image differs from illustrations inside the guide, of this and other species, which are of the minimum fuss, passive posture, focus on the bird type, with few props. Many perching birds are shown on a featureless cylindrical twig, most others have no background support. Grebes coast across the page, feet hanging in an imagined pond. One exception is a displaying Rail-babbler, also featured on the back cover, but even here the props are a pencil sketch, while the bird is detailed and in colour.

   Any field guide to Indonesia and the Malay archipelago faces significant challenges of geographic diversity, with thousands of significant features. Inside the covers are the necessary maps: the front covering the western half of the archipelago, the Greater Sundas, with Wallacea, in the east, inside the back cover. These give islands, regions, national borders and well known biogeographic boundaries; they do not show cities, mountains, rivers or roads. This is not a field guide to all of Indonesia – it does not include Indonesian New Guinea and adjacent West Papuan and Aru islands. Conversely, it does include all of Borneo and Timor. However, the small maps alongside each species illustration, along with the abbreviated text summaries, are adequate to convey distribution across the archipelago and beyond, to peninsula Malaysia, West Papua and the southern Mindanao. Colour is used to show both migration status and breeding records – which seems a good way to highlight areas with sparse records and knowledge gaps.

   Some of that which is not covered in maps, is given in the introductory text on geography, conservation and ornithological history of the archipelago, along with a thoughtful exposition of the authors perspective on taxonomy. They have made some bold, landmark decisions on names. Reading these essays is its own reward.

   The guide text is concise and being in a font size around 8pt or less (no wonder the book is so compact – you may need a lens) it packs in a lot of detail. Nonetheless, given the grouping of species, with illustrations and maps on the right, many of the text pages, at left, have largish areas of blank space. This comes as somewhat of a relief and leaves wriggle room for future revisions. Perhaps the Bahasa Indonesia names could fit.

   The book includes a bibliography – thankyou. The index seems comprehensive, perhaps excessively so. This is the first guide that I’ve noticed listing the specific epithets in the index (e.g. sumatranus, Bubo between sumatrana, Sterna and sumatranus, Corydon. Bubo is listed elsewhere but without species). Do people really look up the second part of a latin species name, rather than finding them listed under the genus? Just when it appears you have found a flaw, this is addressed with a second index, more or less in taxonomic order, giving page number along with English, Scientific and Bahasa Indonesia names.

   I could quibble with a few minor details (I doubt the wisdom of applying an existing Neotropical name, Shrike-vireo, to unrelated Indonesian birds) but these are deliberate author choices and an improvement on what came before. All up, this book is an essential reference to an area with over 13% of global bird diversity.